This article explores the links between 1) the growing militarization of the US–Mexico border; 2) state legislation such as California’s Proposition 187 designed to deny undocumented workers and their non-citizen wives and children state-funded medical, educational, and other social services; 3) the call by some sectors of the population to deny US citizenship to children born in the US to undocumented immigrants, but in most cases also to legally permanent residents who have not yet acquired citizenship; and 5) threats of deportation of undocumented workers, cases highly publicized in both the US and Mexico. It is argued that these phenomena are related to the desire to re-separate the processes of production and reproduction among the now more permanent Mexican labor force working in the US. With the fall of the USSR no other nation has taken upon itself the moral task of criticizing human rights abuses in the US, providing a more permissive environment for the abuses perpetrated against Mexican workers and their families.
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